Olympic Games (interesting, actually)

[SigniferOne]

You're an optimist. I am afraid that there are a lot of old-fashioned classicists who do believe that it all started in Greece.

Worse, this image about the uniqueness of Greece is often repeated in the media; think only of Tom Holland's best-selling Persian Fire, which more or less says that if the Greeks had not won in 480-479, we would have no democracy, philosophy, science.

...

As far as I am concerned, if secondary schools want to teach something about the origin of our civilization, they should give more attention to Babylon and Egypt, at the expense of Greece and Rome. 25/75 seems like a nice division. As long as classicists are not willing to give at least some room to orientalists, it is hypocritical if they say "yes we recognize that X, Y, and Z had antecedents in the east". You can not officially say A but teach B.

I don't understand. Maybe we're speaking past each other here. Haven't I been arguing for Greek exceptionalism? I would be the first to say that if the Greeks hadn't won the Persian Wars, we would have no democracy, philosophy, or science. What's wrong with saying that? Or, what's wrong with saying that without the Greek worship of mankind, we would not have the Olympics as we think of it today? I think that is an entirely accurate statement of the Greek patrimony. It's as I was saying before, someone before the Greeks invented walking -- obviously -- but that is no detriment to the ideals which the Greeks did uniquely infuse. We don't idealize walking, and thereby honor some primordial culture (not Greeks) which invented that. We idealize fitness, beautiful people, six-packs and toned biceps, ideals that do go back straight to the Greeks and not before. In other words, there aren't any chiseled and man-worshiping ideals in Gilgamesh; if the Greeks hadn't developed the Olympics, the Persians or the Babylonians wouldn't have. Why? Because in thousands of years they hadn't*. Plus, those parts of the world without contact with the Greek legacy, say China, had no conception of athletics or medical science until the 19th century, when they were taught about it by the Greek-taught Europeans. So it is very fair to say that had the Greek achievement been destroyed, humanity would most likely be lacking it in everyone else. But the Greeks didn't invent everything; if the Romans were destroyed, the world wouldn't have the concept of 'republic', because the Greeks certainly hadn't achieved it. And so it goes, civilizations build on top of one another. It just so happens that the ideals we hearken back to and idealize as the most important to us, were founded by the Greeks and Romans, and no one else before that (and even since).


* Babylonians needed thousands of years and still didn't have Hipparchus, while the Greeks just took a couple of decades or at most a century, and surpassed the Babylonians in fundamental (rather than just incremental) leaps and bounds.